Richmond Fontaine (acoustic)

About Richmond Fontaine (acoustic)

RICHMOND FONTAINE: HISTORY
2011

Richmond Fontaine was formed
in 1994 at Portland Meadows racetrack in Portland, Oregon as
songwriter/vocalist Willy Vlautin and bassist Dave Harding pored over the
racing form and talked music between races. The two took their mutual love of
Husker Du, Willie Nelson, X, The Blasters, and The Replacements and started
playing music together. Before long, Fontaine was a solid four-piece outfit
with an avid fan-base in the US and abroad.

In the 90's Richmond Fontaine
put out three albums on Cavity Search Records (Safety, Miles From, and Lost
Son) and garnered praise for their powerful blend of rock, country, punk and
folk. Critics took notice of Vlautin's story-based songs, which have often
drawn comparison to the short stories of Raymond Carver and Larry Brown.

In 2002 the band launched El
Cortez Records and began work on a trilogy of albums that would earn critical
acclaim in the US and UK, across Europe and as far away as Australia. 2002's
Winnemucca marked a departure for the band to a more introspective and acoustic-based
style, broadening the band's audience and catching the attention of critics. In
2004 Richmond Fontaine teamed with producer JD Foster (Richard Buckner,
Calexico, Green on Red) on their lauded release, Post to Wire. Uncut named it
Album of the Month and included it in their Top Five Albums of the Year, and
Mojo called it a "must have Americana purchase". Working again with Foster on
2005's The Fitzgerald, the band again garnered rave reviews for this downbeat,
stark, literary study of the working class American West. The Fitzgerald also
received Uncut's Album of the Month, calling it "absolute perfection", and Q
Magazine called it "the most beautiful sad album of the year".

2005 was a big year for the
band and especially for Vlautin, who says the band got him the luckiest break
of his life while touring The Fitzgerald - meeting a literary agent who was a
big believer in his work. After writing short stories and novels for nearly
twenty years, in 2006 Vlautin finally saw the publication of his first novel,
The Motel Life, on Faber and Faber in the UK and Ireland, and then in the US on
Harper Perennial in 2007. The Motel Life earned Vlautin a Silver Pen Award from
the state of Nevada and was one of the few works of fiction to make the
Washington Post's Top 25 Books of 2007. The novel solidified Vlautin's
reputation as one of the most adept storytellers working today.

Looking for a change of
scenery, in 2006 Fontaine loaded up the van and drove to Tucson to record an
album at the legendary Wavelab studio. JD Foster once again oversaw production
on this collection of desert-inspired songs. Featuring guest appearances by
Calexico's Joey Burns and Jacob Valenzuela and Giant Sand's Howe Gelb, Thirteen
Cities counter-balances Vlautin's clean, narrative lyrics with an array of
instrumentation, from piano and vibes to accordion and pedal steel, strings and
horns. The album was lavished with critical praise: The Independent called
Vlautin "the Dylan of the dislocated" and The Sun said "Vlautin's one of the most
compelling songwriters working today, compared equally to great American
novelists like Raymond Carver or John Steinbeck and musicians such as Bruce
Springsteen or Tom Waits."

After a year sabbatical and
the death of his mother, Vlautin emerged with a notebook of songs that would
become We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River (2009). A highly
personal and intimate work, these songs are an inventory of love and loss,
regret and pain, shot through with instrumentation that expresses a gauntlet of
emotion with Fontaine's highly evolved, hard to categorize signature style.
Uncut gave it a five star review saying, 'Raw, autobiographical brilliance' and
the Sunday Express called it, "A dreamy, reverb-laden masterpiece" - 5/5

To date Vlautin has published
two more novels: Northline (2008), which was a San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten
Bestseller, and Lean on Pete (2010), which won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction
and was Hot Press's book of the year. In ten years Vlautin and Richmond
Fontaine have produced seven albums, three novels, an instrumental soundtrack
for a novel (Northline), two live recordings and an EP.

The Motel Life is currently
in production to become a major motion picture starring Emile Hirsch, Stephen
Dorff, Dakota Fanning and Kris Kristoffersen. Richmond Fontaine is currently
wrapping up work on their next release, The High Country, due out September
2011.